Joseph Green: > So far, although you complain--in essence--that Sokal and >Bricmont have taken passages out of context, you have not >demonstrated itt. I have no idea what you are talking about. Sokal and Bricmont actually do a rather elegant job of exposing the ridiculous pretensions of Lacan and company. I am dealing with an entirely different problem, which is the rather widespread perception that this has anything to do with a Marxist critique. The reason that this is important to understand is that Monthly Review Press decided to sell a Pluto Press book titled "Science and the Retreat from Reason" on the basis of its "Sokal-like" strengths. There was some merit to their assumption, but the book itself was an affront to everything MR stands for. It contains bitterly hostile attacks on the ecology movement and labels Rachel Carsons as a panic-monger. The political explanation for this is that the authors stood for "science" against "anti-science", without really thinking through the Marxist implications of what this means. When you fail to make a political and intellectual distinction between socialist politics and science as a social institution, you end up adapting to the corporate/scientific world. In other venues, the authors also endorse nuclear power everywhere and call worries about global warming "bad science". The politics of this are much clearer when you evaluate Sokal's partner Norman Levitt on his own terms. Alan is rather cagey about his relation to Levitt, but close examination will reveal that their goals are the same. Levitt organized a "science wars" conference at NYU a couple of years ago with funding from the right-wing Olin Foundation. In the name of combatting obscurantism, it basically set forth a right wing agenda. It targeted not just the sort of silliness that Lacan is capable of (and that is all it is), but the Marxist critique of science. If you want to understand what such a critique is about, I suggest you take a look at the chapter "The Commoditization of Science" in Lewontin and Levins's "The Dialectical Biologist", which includes the following paragraphs: "MODERN SCIENCE is a product of capitalism. The economic foundation of modern science is the need for capitalists not only to expand horizontally into new regions, but to transform production, create new products, make production methods more profitable, and to do all this ahead of others who are doing the same. Its ideological underpinnings are congruent with these needs and also with the political philosophy of the bourgeois revolution--individualism, belief in a marketplace of internationalism, nationalism, and rejection of authority as the basis of knowledge. "As capitalism developed, so did the ways in which science participated. >From a luxury consumption for the aristocracy (along with court musicians and fools), science became an important ideological weapon in the struggle against feudal theology and a resource for solving practical problems of the economy. After the long depression in the last part of the 18th century, there was a definite upsurge of inventions and innovations in industry and agriculture. The number of patents registered in Great Britain rose from 92 during the 1750s to 477 in the 1780s. Agricultural societies were established around that time, and advances in animal breeding and management resulted in the formation of cattle breeds, such as Hereford. The weight of cattle marketed in London doubled in the course of the eighteenth century, and that of lambs tripled. In the early nineteenth century agricultural journals began to be published. "The leaders of the bourgeois revolutions recognized the potential of scientific research for military and commercial power. Among the earliest scientific societies were the Royal Society, in 1662; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1780 by leaders of the revolution in New England; Franklin's American Philosophical Society (1768); and the Naval Observatory in Greenwich (1675).In France the Directorate founded the Ecole Polytechnique in 1795, and Napoleon urged scientists to develop munitions, as well as a synthetic indigo dye to replace the imports from India that were cut off by war. The systematic surveying and cataloging of the biological resources of tropical regions conquered by European countries led to a flowering of systematic biology under the leadership of Linnaeus. By 1862 the Morrell Act in the United States set up the land grant colleges of agriculture and mechanical arts in recognition of the importance of scientific knowledge for the improvement of farming and mining. "Throughout the first century of the industrial revolution, science enlarged its role as an externality of the capitalist expansion, like roads and lighthouses, and as a way to solve particular problems (as in Pasteur's identification of the Phytophora that threatened to wipe out the French wine industry). But science was not yet a commodity. Its application was still uncertain, its potential still mostly untapped, its product still often an after-the-fact explanation of empirical innovations." Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
